In a former career I consulted within the corporate world. There, the majority of companies used a management approach where levels of managers would have direct reports that would scale upwards to higher levels- essentially a vertical corporate structure. Although there has been a shift within many organizations to a “matrix” or “flat” horizontal platform, the structure of boss and direct report still exists at the core. Since I have been consulting for the legal industry I have seen similarities to the corporate structure, but there are some fundamental differences, and it has always struck me that there could be a better organizational structure within the legal industry that would provide the desirable attributes of accountability and developmental planning.
Almost every firm has department chairs or practice group leaders who are responsible for the management of that portion of the firm. In addition, the mentoring of associates is a big priority for most firms. But is it truly a boss/employee relationship? Do law firms have “management teams.”?
The idea of management teams within the legal industry is not a new idea, but it is one that has been tough to implement. In an ideal setting you would have one partner managing several associates, with responsibility for their utilization, development, and discipline. This way when an associate is underperforming there would be one partner to talk with, who should know all the ins and outs of what is taking place. That is not what we are seeing today. Generally you have an associate working on a multitude of partners’ matters. This creates various issues, among them multiple levels of discounting by responsible attorney, personality differences, and having to request additional work from multiple attorneys to meet billable hour targets. The last of these is the most troubling.
The Redwood Think Tank did a study that indicated that those associates who eventually make partner start out making or surpassing their billable hours target and continues with this trend until they are promoted. Conversely those associates that end up leaving the firm or managed out within the first 5 years start and continue not making their billable hours goal from the beginning.
These facts are pretty powerful in addressing associate development, even after the first year. I am not sold that those associates who underperform are not getting the work solely because of a lack of effort or poor performance. Perhaps it is because they were not placed in the proper environment, and perhaps having the right mentor could be the key to success. A mentor might not only provide the needed billable hours to meet goals, but also the legal and organizational knowledge to propel an associate down the partner track. The opposite is true for those associates who don’t have a sufficient mentor. Are firms losing qualified associates simply because of a substandard organizational structure?
A potentially better structure would be to have one partner feeding work and being responsible for the development of a specific group of associates. This structure might not work with many law firms, as originations and responsible hours vary by group/partner, but it does not mean that you cannot have a boss/direct report relationship. A system that allows the associate to request more work from the mentor, and the mentor using that request to go to other partners for more work if he/she does not have it available could create a more cohesive and development-friendly atmosphere.
Having a structure like this provides the ability to analyze data by mentoring partner to identify development gaps and fill them when needed. I am not suggesting that underperformance is always due to a lack of mentoring, I am simply suggesting having accountability by associate and partner so there are two points of contact.
The question remains how to make this feasible and cause a shift to the suggested structure. The first suggestion is robust time-keeping software that can break out and measure the performance of mentoring time as well as other non-billable activities. The second, and more important suggestion, is that the performance of those associates whom a Partner is mentoring should be included within the partner compensation process. For most firms the focus for partner compensation continues to be billable hour generation and collections. The idea of assigning a portion of compensation has been quite subjective. If management teams are in place, and you truly measure the success of those teams, you end up assigning a number that can be benchmarked against other teams. Placing a quantitative value on mentoring and addressing it within partner compensation would be give this process the best chance to affect real change.
--Russ Haskin
Russ Haskin is Director of Consulting for Redwood Analytics/Lexis Nexis.
Posted
Tue, Nov 25 2008 12:34 PM
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